Conway's Law and Innovation

Transcript

1. © 2012 Trimble Navigation Ltd / Conway’s Law and its Consequences / Westminster, CO / 12 Jan 2012 Conway’s Law and Innovation - a conjecture Ravi Pappu Co-Founder / Advanced Development Group ThingMagic, A Division of Trimble 1
2. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture Conway’s Law “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Melvin E. Conway, How do committees invent?, Datamation Magazine, April, 1968. 2
3. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture Raymond’s corollary “If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler” Eric S. Raymond (October 1996). The New Hacker's Dictionary - 3rd Edition. 3
4. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture E1, S1 E2, S2 E3, S3 Quality of these interfaces reflects the quality and nature of real-world interpersonal communication between the groups Customers 4 1
5. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture Products and systems tend to mirror the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed. This dynamic occurs because the organization’s governance structures, problem solving routines and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions 5 2
6. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” Sir Alec Issigonis, Designer of the Mini 6
7. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture “There was a willful designing of the systems to measure the risks in a certain way that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks” Gregg Berman co-head of the risk-management group at RiskMetrics, a software company spun out of JPMorgan. 7
8. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture Software Development “We find strong evidence to support the mirroring hypothesis.” MacCormack et al. Exploring the duality between product and organizational architectures: A test of the mirroring hypothesis. (2008) 8
9. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture EPC - early vision The Networked Physical World: Proposals for Engineering the Next Generation of Computing, Commerce & Automatic- Identification, Sarma, S; Brock, D. L., Ashton, K, MIT-AUTOID-WH-001.pdf, 2000 9
10. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture EPC Standards Process http://www.epcglobalus.org/Standards 10
11. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture Tag Data Structure 11
12. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture The Conjecture A necessary condition for breakout innovation is a systematic violation of Conway’s Law i.e. elimination of existing patterns of communication 12
13. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture E1, S1 E2, S2 E3, S3 Quality of these interfaces reflects the quality and nature of real-world interpersonal communication between the groups 13
14. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture S0 - designed and implemented by team E0, outside the existing development organization E0, S0 14
15. © 2012 Ravi Pappu / Conway’s Law and Innovation - A Conjecture Practically speaking... • Create a protected chunk of spacetime for the team working on the new system. • No other “day-job”. • Free them from meetings/reports etc. Let them set up their own internal and external communication structure. • Let system architecture drive group organization • Constraints - require a demonstrable prototype as soon as possible • Everybody should be a contributor. 15